Portraits in Style (Volumes 1-4). (Keyboard).

Portraits in Style (Volumes 1-4), by Marilyn Briant and Andrew Zatman. The Piano Teacher's Press/Manduca Music Publications, (P.O. Box 10550, Portland, ME 04104), 2001. 22-26pp. each, $8 each. Intermediate to moderately difficult.

The warm nostalgia of a sweet memory, the hardy spirit of a western barn-raising, the stylized and sultry motions of the habanera, the carefree shuffle of 1920s American popular dances. These are among the many images and moods evoked by selections from the four volumes of Portraits in Style by Marilyn Briant and Andrew Zatman, pianists, teachers, composers--and spouses--residing in Rockville, Maryland. As I spent an enjoyable afternoon reading through the pieces, it was easy to recognize the models of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collections by Schumann, Heller, Mendelssohn and Debussy, together with the harmonic and rhythmic hallmarks of American popular song and dance.

The thirty-three character pieces found in this collection are grouped by themes that title the four volumes: Foreign Impressions, Imagination Bouquet, Piano Postcards and Treasured Traditions: New Music in Familiar Forms. Although there is no attempt at progression based on difficulty, the pieces fit well into the late intermediate to early advanced levels. Each of the four volumes includes easier and more challenging pieces in several styles, offering pleasures for almost any musical palate. The variety of musical idioms represented is probably most familiar--and therefore most appealing--to young and middle-aged adults who play recreationally and who have reached an advancing intermediate level of attainment at the piano.

Each page of score is spaciously laid out, meticulous and uncluttered. Dynamic markings, together with pedaling and fingering suggestions, offer expressive clues without being intrusive. The composers know that micromanaging the performer is unnecessary when-the effect of the music is communicated so clearly through the notes themselves. A few of the almost exclusively ternary form compositions have written-out A-section returns, but a great many include a D.C. al Coda, which necessitates several pesky page turns.

Pianists reading through a number of these pieces may ...